Southwestern Pennsylvania was culturally influenced by northern Virginia, an area that continued to be dominated by Georgian architecture.

The outbuildings reflect the various activities undertaken in and around this house - butchering, smoking and salting meats, gathering wood for winter months, preserving foods, laundering clothes and so on.

In 1838 Theophilus married Rebecca Dennis of Germantown, PA and brought his bride to Bloomington.

During this period, the character of Bloomington had begun to change from a frontier settlement to a burgeoning college town.

In addition to family, the Wylies took in two boarders at a time, either students or young professors from the college.

Among them was Lizzie Breckinridge, an African American woman and daughter of a former slave, who came to work and live with the family in 1856 at the age of thirteen.

Theophilus began to experiment with photography soon after the daguerreotype process was invented in 1839, many of the photographs he took at the house survive today.

And in 1876 Theophilus installed the first telephone in state of Indiana, built from plans sent to him from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, that ran between the house and a college laboratory.

Dr. Amos Hershey, a professor of political science at Indiana University, bought the house from the Wylie heirs in 1915.

Then in the period between 1960 and 1965, major restorations of the house were conducted aimed at bringing it back to its original configuration.